Using narratives in collaborative writing: An example

Abstract

Document coherence is often harder to achieve in collaborative writing owing to a lack of group consensus and misaligned contributions by the co-authors. By ‘coherence’ we refer to the feature of a text that makes it easy to read and understand. This can be linked to the implicit story that a document conveys to its reader. Despite being an integral aspect of a successful document, software support for coherence is minimal. Collaborative writing tools do ensure syntactic consistency but this still does not guarantee coherence. Other approaches such as agreeing on an outline at the start can improve the document but outlines too have their shortcomings. Previously, we introduced a technique called narrative-based writing to fill these gaps and built a prototype of a tool that allows co-authors to engage in this method. The purpose of this paper is to present an example of how a team of authors can make use of this narrative-based technique and tool, and show how the corresponding document evolves.

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